At the beginning of 2024, a few of us shared some reading resolutions—specific titles we wanted to read, habits we wanted to cultivate, book-related projects we wanted to try. Here, we look back at the year and see how reality lined up to our expectations and aspirations.
Mariana Ruiz
I am still chipping away at all of Stephen King’s career: I’ve read everything he has produced recently (although I need to check the short story compilations and miscellanea, which is going to prove hard to track), and my favorite was Later: a kid who has the uncanny ability to see and talk to ghosts, a corrupt cop who knows his secret, and some fantastic Tibetan lore. It is woven together as a novella, a long tall tale, a fresh glass of water. It’s King at his best. Now that he is pushing 77, I wish him clarity of thought and more books to come, pretty please. He says that people who feel empathy get more scared of his books; he looks at the human condition with clarity and compassion and knows that monsters are lurking in the night, most of them human.
As for diverse voices, I am resolutely including a lot more works in translation in our Stack Overflow (I would say that they are up by 25%). All these diverse voices, authors, and countries have brought me nothing but joy. John the Skeleton, a book translated from Estonian, was the highlight of the year for me.
GeekDad is a place where I have gotten the opportunity to access and read a wide array of new titles. Since I reside in Bolivia, a very complicated country, I am grateful for the opportunity and marvel at my luck every single year.
Jenny Bristol
I started 2024 out strong, with a good push toward my 24 book reading goal. I stayed on a steady schedule until the fall, when I guess I got caught up in too many TV shows and slowed my reading speed. So, December has had a last-minute push to finish four books (so much for my two-books-a-month pace!), but I’ll make it! I’m nothing if not stubborn.
As usual, I had a long list of books I wanted to read this year, but I only knocked out a few of them, and instead read random other books that came across my notice. I keep intending to read more Matt Haig (I’ll remedy that next year) and finish Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series (but she keeps writing more!), but I’ve found that it’s more important to me to keep up my reading momentum than to read anything specific. So, unlike most of my life plans, I’ve just gone in the direction of my whims, which I actually prefer.
Jonathan H. Liu
I did finally hit my goal of 150 books this year with about a week to spare, so that was fun. I do always clarify that I set a high number because I include a good number of kids’ novels and graphic novels in my reading log and those can be pretty quick reads, but I did manage to read a few longer books as well. Still not a huge proportion of non-fiction books, but that’s just where I’m at these days. (Okay, years.)
A few years ago I decided to try reducing my reliance on Amazon as much as possible, and that included Goodreads, where I was logging my reads. I started using Storygraph, and I’ve been pretty happy with that. I mostly just log what books I’ve read and give them a rating, so I don’t use a lot of the other features there, but that works pretty well for me.
I did read A Quantum Love Story by Mike Chen and wrote about it back in February, and then finally started on the Spiderwick Chronicles series by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi in time for spooky season (though I still need to read the rest of the series). Those were the only specific titles I had listed this year but I tend to do better with those, so maybe I’ll try to do more of that for next year.
The one big reading habit I had mentioned in January was to spend more time in my basement office, reading the books I have stashed here and maybe getting to the point where I could see the floor again. At the very least, there are several boxes of books that I should either read or get rid of (though I always tell myself I’ll have so much time to read when I “retire,” right?). Unfortunately, that did not happen at all this year, and if anything I have accumulated even more boxes of books and it’s gotten even more difficult to walk around in my office without stepping over and around them. (That photo at the top of this post is just a fraction of the books in my office area.) It feels like this may take a hard reset at some point but I’m not quite ready to do that yet.
Robin Brooks
I’m not sure how many books I hit this year. I did read more than in previous years though, I think. I could count it up, as for most of the year I wrote monthly round-up columns of the books I read.
The main thing I wanted to do in 2024 was build up my YouTube channel. Like a lot of my ideas, this fell by the wayside fairly quickly. By April, I’d given up on YouTube. It’s remarkably hard to create good quality meaningful videos, and I found I wasn’t dedicated enough to push through. The monthly book round-ups on GeekDad were the final vestiges of that idea and even they dropped away by the end of the year, when I missed my November round-up and December preview. I don’t intend to return to them in 2025.
Which leaves me in much the same position at the end of 2024 as I was going into it. How best to review? I’ve dropped X altogether and barely make a dent on Bluesky or Threads. Social media is generally a time sink I don’t need, so I suspect, bar the odd author tag on those platforms, I won’t use them.
On book-specific resolutions, I did get my signed copy of Jasper Fforde’s Red Side Story – the long-awaited sequel to Shades of Grey. The book arrived at the end of January, but I finally picked it up a week before Christmas, because I new I had to write this post. I still have my weird foible of not reading follow up books in series I’m enjoying. As far as a review of Red Side Story goes, I probably should have reread Shades of Grey first, as I struggled to remember what was going on. The book was fine, but nothing outstanding.
I didn’t finish Susie Dent’s Interesting Stories about Curious Words, not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because without the impetus to read an entry per day, as had been the case for Word Perfect, I started skipping my nightly read to focus on whatever novel I was reading. At first, I did catch-up reads, but soon, it became covered over by other books and got forgotten. I must return to it soon.
I’m left in a quandry about how to approach reading in 2025, but I guess we’ll talk more about that in our New Year’s reading resolutions post!
